Sermons
September 1, 2024 (Proper 17)
The joy of the Lord is our strength.
Nehemiah 7:73b—8:12
It was eight years of drought—the worst we’ve seen, before or since.
Not that we didn’t get any rain—every now and then one of those big thunderheads would build up on the horizon of an evening, and we’d stand outside and watch it as it moved closer to us, watch the top of it flatten out, and it’d rain for a few minutes, then it’d move on by. And the sun’d come out, and the bricks and things would steam for a little bit, then it was all over.
That little rain put a little crust on the dirt, but it wasn’t enough to soak in. Never enough to soak in. And the next day it’d be as hot as ever, and we kids would go try and find a pond or something to get into and cool off, although a lot of the ponds dried up because it hadn’t rained.
Mama got to giving the baby a bath in the afternoon, putting him in the tub just to cool him off some.[1]
And Daddy would come in for supper out of the fields with a worried look on his face that said the crops didn’t look too good. There were so many days when he came in with that look over those eight years, I lost count.
Sometimes at night when we were supposed to be asleep I’d hear him talking to Mama about it. They’d talk about debts, and back taxes, and deeds, and sheriff’s sales, and all sorts of things that I didn’t know at first what they meant, but as I grew up during those years I got to understand. They were things that meant if those crops didn’t do good this year, we could be in some trouble.
I did know what trouble looked like: My best friend sitting on the back of her daddy’s old truck that had washboards and chairs and all sorts of things tied on it, everything they could fit and the rest they had to leave behind, and she waved goodbye to me because they had lost their farm and had to go to California to see if her daddy and her brothers could find some work.
A little boy I knew didn’t have a daddy anymore, at least not at home, because when he couldn’t take care of his family because of the depression and the drought he just left because he didn’t know what else to do.
Another one’s daddy ran a little grocery store, and so I thought they ought to be rich, but they weren’t—and I found out later that it was because when somebody came in needing food and couldn’t pay he’d give it to them on credit. Nobody could pay him back, but he kept on doing it, and so he didn’t make any money and get rich like I thought a storekeeper should. His kids always had plenty to eat, but they never had new clothes or fancy do-dads any more than the rest of us did.
Sometimes when we needed some money Mama went down to this little place in town that served plate lunches—mainly to people passing through because nobody we knew had any money to buy a plate lunch—and she’d work there for a little while. There was a woman whose husband had left her with a couple little kids, and she would come to the back door of that place every day, and they would save all the scraps for her—a little bit of fat someone cut off their meat, half a scoop of mashed potatoes, a spoonful or two of beans somebody didn’t finish. She would take those scraps home, and that was supper for her and her kids.
My friends who lived by the train tracks said that people would sometimes ride around in the boxcars, and if the train stopped they might go see if somebody would feed them a meal. One girl’s daddy ran a gas station, and one day she told me about how her daddy came home late for dinner and there wasn’t any dinner for him because her mama had given it to one of those “bums,” she called them.[2]
When the boys in town grew up and got out of school there wasn’t any work for them, so some of them went and joined something called the “CCC,”[3] and they would live in camps and work at the national parks. And some of the men got work from the WPA, building roads and sidewalks and swimming pools and stone walls around parks and cemeteries. But there wasn’t enough of those jobs for everybody who needed work, and men like my daddy needed to keep their farms going, so they didn’t go to the WPA.
Every year when fall would come, and the weather would get cooler, Daddy would go harvest whatever crops hadn’t dried up and blown away. And there wasn’t ever much.
Sometimes Daddy would go away for awhile after he got the crops in, up north or somewhere to see if there was anybody there who had done better and who might pay a strong man to help out for a little bit. And he usually found some work somewhere, and he’d come back with a little money—not a lot, but enough to pay some of those taxes and debts he and Mama worried about at night. And so we got by.
Every year we’d all think, “Next year it’ll be better. The rain will come back next year.” But then it didn’t.
One summer, I think when I was 11 or 12, we all decided we had to do something. That was the sixth summer we hadn’t had any rain, the sixth summer with the big dust clouds rolling on the wind, the sixth summer it was so awful hot.
The preacher at the Baptist church decided to have a revival meeting, and he brought in some big-time preacher that yelled at us every night for a week about how the drought was punishment for our sins, and if we would repent then maybe God would forgive us and open up the heavens and send rain again. You wouldn’t believe the line of people going down that aisle every night, and the long, tearful prayers they said. I didn’t understand, because all the people in our town were good people, not wicked like that preacher who didn’t know us said, and I couldn’t figure out what God could be punishing us for.
But like I said, this was the sixth year without any rain, and people were willing to do anything if they thought it might do some good.
It didn’t.
Everybody repented of everything they could think of—one old fellow testified, with many tears, about how he’d stolen a little piece of candy from the store when he was five years old—but still there wasn’t any rain.
A couple of the men in the town were out fishing one day, trying to get some extra meat to put on the table, and there were some Indians at the fishing hole too, and they reached down into the water and pulled out the fish with their bare hands. And these fellows came back with a story about an old Indian who could do a rain dance, and every time he’d done that dance, it had always rained inside of a week afterwards.
Why he hadn’t started dancing a few years sooner, I didn’t know.
Anyway, these men got the whole town together out at the fairgrounds one evening, and this old Indian came out all dressed in buckskin and beads and feathers, and another Indian played a drum, and he played while the other one danced. He danced, and danced and danced, and one of those thunderheads started building up in the west, and we heard a little thunder and saw a little lightning. But right about the time it started to get dark, and he quit dancing, the storm fell apart.
That year was the closest we came to losing our farm. Daddy only got enough for the little bit of crop he harvested to pay the taxes, and when he went north looking for work he didn’t find a whole lot. Mama worked a little bit in town, and my sister and I found some people who needed somebody to take care of their babies so they could go to work. They couldn’t pay us any money for that, but they fed us dinner every day, which made things a little easier at our house.
It went on like that for two more years. More people lost their farms; every week in the newspaper there was another notice of a sheriff’s sale, and after just about every sale another truck filled with a family and a few sticks of furniture left town heading for California.
We just barely hung on, and sometimes at night I would hear Mama and Daddy talking about maybe we should give up and go, too. But we never did.
In that last year there was an election, and every time a politician would show up to make a speech, somebody would ask them, “What are you going to do about the drought?” Some of them would make promises, which were all ridiculous because the main thing that needed to happen was for it to rain, and no man could make it rain. But our mayor and all our representatives lost their elections, like it was their fault the drought was still going on.
A few people in town quit going to church, and a lot of us wondered why God wouldn’t answer all the prayers we’d said asking for rain.
When the crops were in that year, and Daddy got back from working up north, he and Mama had a long talk. This time they made a new decision. They had done the best they could, but were falling further and further behind. They would hang on for one more year, and if it didn’t rain and Daddy couldn’t get a good crop, we would have to give up and go to California like so many of our friends and neighbors had had to do. Mama cried a little, when she thought we couldn’t hear her.
Winter came and went, and then spring. Like the eight years before, we had a little rain at the beginning of the spring. We didn’t dare hope that it would keep up. But it did.
It rained, and rained, and rained that spring. The men borrowed just enough money to buy seed, and then they went out and planted it. And the rain kept on coming, plenty of it, at just the right time. The ponds and rivers and swimming holes filled up. The crops grew beautiful and green, and the harvest was abundant.
When November came, the city fathers and the preachers made the announcement that we were going to have a big Thanksgiving feast, all of us together, everybody in town and on the farms around town.
We sat down at long tables they put right out in the street. The politicians made speeches. And the preachers prayed, one after another. Men, women, and children cried. And then came the feast: more food than most of us had seen in the last eight years. Everybody had brought whatever they could. We ate, and we laughed, and then the little ones went to play at the park, while the rest of us found some boxes and dishes and packaged up the leftovers to take to the people who couldn’t come out to the dinner.
God was still with us, and it was going to be all right. There were still hard times to come—less than two weeks later we came home from church and turned on the radio to hear the President talking about “a day that will live in infamy.” But we knew now that God had brought us through eight years of drought, and that he would even bring us through the war that would have to be fought.
For a long time after that we kept on having that big Thanksgiving celebration every year. Even during the war, when a lot of things were rationed, we still had a feast. Every year we remembered that God had helped us through that drought, and through the war, and through all kinds of other hard times, and so we laughed and thanked God and ate and sent plates home to the folks who couldn’t get out.
And that celebration every year made us remember that God could be trusted to take care of us and give us strength to face whatever came our way.
[1] A lot of the stories here are true, told to me by my parents or grandparents.
[2] I heard this from one of my church ladies in Iowa. Even though my story is set in Oklahoma, the Depression and the Dust Bowl affected the upper Midwest, too.
[3] Civilian Conservation Corps, part of FDR’s New Deal.